"Our backyard looked like a marketplace. Valuable objects, precious rugs, silver candlesticks, Bibles and other ritual objects were strewn over the dusty grounds--pitiful relics that seemed never to have had a home. All this under a magnificient blue sky" (15).
What he is saying here is that when the Jews were forced to leave, they couldn't bring much stuff with them. All the other items were placed in backyards and everywhere else, making the place look like a junk yard or as he describes it in the book, a marketplace.
"Here came the Chief Rabbi, hunched over, his face strange looking without a beard, a bundle on his back. His very presence in the procession was enough to make the scene seem surreal. It was like a page torn from a book, a historical novel, perhaps, dealing with the captivity in Babylon or the Spanish Inquisition. They passed me by, one after the other, my teachers, my friends, the others, some of whom I had once feared, some of whom I had found ridiculous, all those whose lives I had shared for years. There they went, defeated, their bundles, their lives in tow, having left behind their homes, their childhood" (17).
What he is saying here is that he is very moved as he walks beside and was being passed by people he was afraid of like maybe a mean teacher or people he thought were ridiculous and strange, yet at this time, he saw that they had all been brought together by the same fate.
“But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things” (7).
Moishe had gone through much suffering to escape and warn his people of the impending danger. All they do is shun him and say that he is lying. What he said was just so terrible that they didn't want to believe it or even hear it. They blinded themselves to their own eventual fates. Had they listened to Moishe, they may have been able to escape their fate. They could have gone into hiding, or fled farther away from the advancing Germans. Later, those same people will be desperate to let the World know about the horros of the ghettos, camps, and killing centers. But just like them, those who do hear of the horrors will not believe it until it's too late.
Class Discussion questions:
Share quotes that impacted you both then choose one to share with the class and explain why it impacted you all.
"They passed me by, one after the other, my teachers, my friends, the others, some of whom I had once feared, some of whom I had found ridiculous, all those whose lives I had shared for years. There they went, defeated, their bundles, their lives in tow, having left behind their homes, their childhood" (17)
Sad. The strongest people are now lowered and powerless. They were leaving everything they had and it was sas bcause the people watching them go not only knew them but knew they had to go next.
Who is Moshe the Beadle? Why do you think Wiesel used him as his introduction? (Think about your good intro. techniques!)
Moishe the Beadle was a foreign Jew who managed to escape the kiling centers. He tried to warn everone, but no one believed him. It's a good foreshadow because he was trying to tell everyone the Holocaust was coming and they didn't believe him. Getting the reader interested. Some people knew what was coming The stuff he said was so unbelievable that people thought he was mad. What was happening was crazy. No one could really believe it. Current situation: Jews as part of life. German plans: take outsiders. Make others trust them. Understand that Germans were smart and decieving. The Jews were trusting. The World was in denial. 3 years into the War, the Nazis have been hiding the Holocaust. 4 years into the war-their life is still normal. Holocaust is still hidden. Spring of 1944-one year before the end of the war-They start taking the people in Romania where Weisel lived. In 1943, they know they will lose the War. They keep the machine running to kill as many Jews as possible before they lose.
Look up the word ghetto – can you find a definition that links to what we have learned about ghettoes in the book? Paste the definition and explain its connection.
A section of a city,especially a thickly populated slum area,inhabited predominantly by members of an ethnic or other minority group,often as a result of social or economic restrictions,pressures,or hardships. The Ghettoes in Europe were sectioned off areas of the city thickly populated with people of the Jewish ethnic group as a result of social restrictions, pressures, and hardships, just like the definition says.
What are the steps in the “race toward death” (10)? List all of the steps (there are more than 5!)
Jews prohibited from leaving homes for 3 days under penalty of death. Jews forbidden to own gold, jewelry, or other valuables. All Jews have to wear a yellow star. Jews can't go to restuarants, travel by train, attend synagogue, or be out after 6 o'clock pm. Move to ghettoes Liquidation of the Ghettoes Move to smaller Ghetto Final liquidation Sent away on the trains
Chapters 2 and 3 Lars Response:
The two quotes I choose that impacted me are particularly meaningful to me are:
"There are eighty of you in this wagon," added the German officer. "If anyone is missing, you'll all be shot, like dogs. . . ." (24)
"Look! Look at it! Fire! A terrible fire! Mercy! Oh that fire!" (25)
I would say that this quote almost seemed a reflection of what was to come. Mrs. Schachter had already been through a horrible ordeal. She had lost most of her family and was beginning to lose her mind. She was already in a living hell, a fiery place of evil. Later in the book, when Wiesel was talking about the barracks, he stated "This is what the antechamber of hell must look like (34). Once he had begun to experience the ordeal of the camps, Wiesel was also comparing them to fiery, evil hell, albeit in a less dramatic way. Perhaps, he may eventually have been reduced to the state of Mrs. Schachter as well. Another interesting thing about this quote is that one of the first sights the prisoners see upon entering the camp is the crematorium, and many of them meet their deaths in its fiery blaze. This is an amazing example of how even a work of non-fiction can still use foreshadowing.
What has surprised me the most in chapters 1-3 is how clueless the Jews were regarding their upcoming fate. (Partner B)
What surprised me was that people behaved so differently toward each other. Some, like the Pole on pg. 41, tried to be kind and warn the prisoners about their fates. Others, like the man on pg. 30, tried to help the new prisoners survive, but also became enraged at them for their ignorance. Another man on the same page also became angry, insulting the prisoners and acting as if they should have known what was in store. Curiously, these men had probably both fallen into the same trap, so they really couldn't blame anyone. And back on the train, on pg. 26, some of the prisoners savagely beat Mrs. Schachter because she was waking them up and beginning to frighten them. However, now that I think about it, this isn't very surprising. These people probably had little in common other than their religion, and possibly their hometown. It's natural that they would quarrell. Also, some people are selfish while others care about others. If anything, a horrible situation like this would only intensify emotions and personalities, creating people that would beat up a woman just to keep her quiet, and those that would be humane and try to warn others. (Partner A)
List of things that are confusing, unfamiliar
foreign Jews (3). I was confused why some Jews in Transylvania would be considered foreign (3)
I was unfamiliar with why there would be two ghettos in one town (9).
I am unfamiliar with what a Jewish council was and why they were set up (9). http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005265
Truncheon (13). I didn't know what is was.
Where did the people go in the ghettos who were originally living there (17).
Los! (32)
Sonder-Kommando (32) http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007327 4th paragraph of the Operation Reinhard section.
"Form fives!" (37)
1. Read one other pair’s wiki response page focusing on what they say has surprised/affected/etc them the most. How does their response link to yours?
It was all different. Everyone has a different thing that surprised/affected them the most.
2. What are the Jews reactions to: Moishe the Beadle, the ghettoes, and Madame Schachter?
Originally they were all terrified. They then began to feel some sympathy for Madame Schachter, thinking she was mad. However, as she continued to utter warnings, she began to scare them again and they had her bound and gagged, and then beat her several times to make her shut up. They starting acting like she was selfish, shouting things like "She's not the only one in here."
3. Looking carefully through your answers to #2, what is similar about all of these and why is this similarity a logical way for the Jews to act?
Fear and denial. They didn't want to admit that terrible things were going to happen.
4. What do you think the title, Night, means?
Night is the end of the day and the begining of the dark and evil times. The end of the relatively good lives of the Jews as they are moving into the darkness and evil of the Nazi regime. They are now in utter darkness.
Chpt 4
"I felt no pity for him. In fact, I was pleased with what was happening to him: my gold crown was safe. It could be useful to me one day, to buy something, some bread or even time to live. At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my crust of stale bread. The bread, the soup--those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time" (52).
What he means here is that at this: so much pain and suffering has happened to him that it doesn't really matter anymore and that he feels no shame in trying to simply survive.
Near the end, Wiesel witnesses the hanging of several people, one of which was a young boy who was adored by everyone in the camp. Wiesel and the other prisoners watch as the men and the boy are brought up to the gallows and hanged. They then have to file past the corpses and witness the boys death throws as he slowly suffocates due to how light he is. Wiesel was one of the people that had to file past him while he was still alive. As he wtinessed this, he lost his faith in God, believing that the Nazis had even destroyed him. I found this to be horrifying and ended up imagining myself in the boy's place and thinking what a terrible way it was to die. (Partner A)
What is so horrifying about this scene is that it is here that Elie Wiesel loses all of this faith in God, and really humanity. He made a point of talking about his religion and faith in God in the beginning of Night and how much his religion and faith defined him. But it is at this stage, when he sees the horrible pain of this boy, who still represented a human being in the camps, he feels that he has not only lost his faith in God, he has lost his faith in himself.
Chapter 5
The passage that describes Akiba Drumer's eyes is: "His eyes would suddenly go blank, leaving two gaping wounds, two wells of terror" (76).
Drumer's soul has become blank as he has lost the will to live. He lost his will when he lost his faith and the will to fight. He no longer believed God was there for him, and he no longer believed the horror would end. He saw no reason to continue living in this state, and his resolve crumbled. Elie Wiesel also lost his faith, and he did begin to lose the will to live. He felt he was in a living hell, abandoned by God, from which he would never escape. However, he had another factor that determined his fate. He would not be separated from his father. This superceded any choice over whether to live or die. He would live if his father was living, and he would follow him to death if it happened. This was shown at the beginning, on pg. 32, when they were facing the selection at the entrance to the camps. "I first wanted to see where they would send my father. Were he to have gone to the right, I would have run after him." He chose to follow his father into either life or death.
My quote that I find powerful: "What are You, my God? I thought angrily. How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does Your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe, in the face of all this cowardice, this decay and this misery?" (66)
Chapters 6/7
My father had huddled near me, draped in his blanket, shoulders laden with snow. And what if he were dead, as well? I called out to him. No response. I would have screamed if I could have. He was not moving. Suddenly, the evidence overswhelmed me: there was no longer any reason to live, any reason to fight" (98-99).
His father is the only thing that kept him alive at this point. He didnt want his father to live through seeing his own son perish so he fought very hard to survive. If his father had not been with him, he would be dead right now.
"He had lost his son in the commotion. He had searched for him among the dying, to no avail. Then he had dug through the snow to find his body. In vain. For three years, they had stayed close to one another. Side by side, they had endured the suffering, the blows; they had waited for their ration of bread and they had prayed. Three years, from camp to camp, from selection to selection. And now--when the end seemed near--fate had separated them. When he came near me, Rabbi Eliahu whispered, 'It happened on the road. We lost sight of one another during the journey. I fell behind a little, at the rear of the column. I didn't have the strength to run anymore. And my son didn't notice. That's all I know. Where has he disappeared? Where can I find him? Perhaps you've seen him somewhere?' 'No, Rabbi Eliahu, I haven't seen him.' And so he left, as he had come: a shadow swept away by the wind. He had already gone through the door when I remembered that I had noticed his son running beside me. I had forgotten and so had not mentioned it to Rabbi Eliahu! But then I remembered something else: his son had seen him losing ground, sliding back to the rear of the column. He had seen him. And he had continued to run in front, letting the distance between them become greater" (90-91).
What had happened here is that the rabbi had lost his son and was looking for him, Elie had seen the son run ahead so he could die and not have his father seem him die. However, Elie did not remember what had happened until after the rabbi left, so he did not get to tell him about the rabbi son's fate. Perhaps it was for the best.
Chapters 8 and 9
The quote from the book that affected me most was, "we received no food. We lived on snow; it took the place of our bread. The days resembles the nights, and the nights left in our souls the dregs of their darkness. The train rolled slowly, often halted for a few hours and continued. It never stopped snowing. We remained lying on the floor for days and nights, on on top of the other, never uttering a word. We were nothing but frozen bodies. Our eyes closed, we merely waited for the next stop, to unload our dead."
This quote affects me so much because I like how he says the days resembled the nights, meaning it didn't matter what time of day it was, he felt as if he was dead. In other words, his soul had been taken by the experience and he felt nothing.
I was actually sadder during the middle of the book because he was able to express his feeling and story more, because his father was still alive, and that meant that he had something to live for. By the end of the book, his father is dead and his book becomes almost rushed, as if he did not want to complete it because his father was dead. I felt by the end, he really had given up, not only with life, but with telling his story.
The quote that affected me the most was "My father was pleading. 'My son, water...I'm burning up...My insides...' 'Silence over there!' barked the officer. 'Eliezer,' continued my father, 'water...' The officer came closer and shouted at him to be silent. But my father did not here. He continued to call me. The officer wielded his club and dealt him a violent blow to the head. I didn't move. I was afraid, my body was afraid of another blow, this time to my head. My father groaned once more, I heard: 'Eliezer...' I could see that he was still breathing--in gasps. I didn't move." This affected me because it is such a horrible scene. A grown man, reduced to an torturous, uncomprehending, child-like state, being beaten by an officer despite the fact he only has hours to live while his son doesn't lift a finger. The officer was displaying how cruel man can be, Elie Wiesel was displaying how defeated, scared, and indifferent man can become, and Wiesel's father was displaying what man can be reduced to.
At the end of the book, I felt horrified by the atrocities of the Nazis. In one year, they had turned a caring, devoted, child into a souless, hunger-driven corpse. And he was one of the lucky ones! Others suffered far worse fates. It was an indescribable tragedy.
All the terrible stuff that happened was because of indifference. The Nazis destroyed you by destroying your soul. Making you INDIFFERENT to your fate. The Nazis hated the Jews as a whole, and this made them completely indifferent to the sufferings of each individual Jews. He started to become indifferent to what happened to his father. He didn't hate him, but he didn't really love him. He also lost all faith. He was indifferent to God. He was indifferent to the possibilty of survival. He no longer cared.
"Our backyard looked like a marketplace. Valuable objects, precious rugs, silver candlesticks, Bibles and other ritual objects were strewn over the dusty grounds--pitiful relics that seemed never to have had a home. All this under a magnificient blue sky" (15).
What he is saying here is that when the Jews were forced to leave, they couldn't bring much stuff with them. All the other items were placed in backyards and everywhere else, making the place look like a junk yard or as he describes it in the book, a marketplace.
"Here came the Chief Rabbi, hunched over, his face strange looking without a beard, a bundle on his back. His very presence in the procession was enough to make the scene seem surreal. It was like a page torn from a book, a historical novel, perhaps, dealing with the captivity in Babylon or the Spanish Inquisition. They passed me by, one after the other, my teachers, my friends, the others, some of whom I had once feared, some of whom I had found ridiculous, all those whose lives I had shared for years. There they went, defeated, their bundles, their lives in tow, having left behind their homes, their childhood" (17).
What he is saying here is that he is very moved as he walks beside and was being passed by people he was afraid of like maybe a mean teacher or people he thought were ridiculous and strange, yet at this time, he saw that they had all been brought together by the same fate.
“But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things” (7).
Moishe had gone through much suffering to escape and warn his people of the impending danger. All they do is shun him and say that he is lying. What he said was just so terrible that they didn't want to believe it or even hear it. They blinded themselves to their own eventual fates. Had they listened to Moishe, they may have been able to escape their fate. They could have gone into hiding, or fled farther away from the advancing Germans. Later, those same people will be desperate to let the World know about the horros of the ghettos, camps, and killing centers. But just like them, those who do hear of the horrors will not believe it until it's too late.
Class Discussion questions:
- "They passed me by, one after the other, my teachers, my friends, the others, some of whom I had once feared, some of whom I had found ridiculous, all those whose lives I had shared for years. There they went, defeated, their bundles, their lives in tow, having left behind their homes, their childhood" (17)
Sad. The strongest people are now lowered and powerless. They were leaving everything they had and it was sas bcause the people watching them go not only knew them but knew they had to go next.- Who is Moshe the Beadle? Why do you think Wiesel used him as his introduction? (Think about your good intro. techniques!)
Moishe the Beadle was a foreign Jew who managed to escape the kiling centers. He tried to warn everone, but no one believed him. It's a good foreshadow because he was trying to tell everyone the Holocaust was coming and they didn't believe him.Getting the reader interested.
Some people knew what was coming
The stuff he said was so unbelievable that people thought he was mad. What was happening was crazy.
No one could really believe it.
Current situation: Jews as part of life.
German plans: take outsiders. Make others trust them.
Understand that Germans were smart and decieving. The Jews were trusting. The World was in denial.
3 years into the War, the Nazis have been hiding the Holocaust.
4 years into the war-their life is still normal. Holocaust is still hidden.
Spring of 1944-one year before the end of the war-They start taking the people in Romania where Weisel lived.
In 1943, they know they will lose the War. They keep the machine running to kill as many Jews as possible before they lose.
A section of a city,especially a thickly populated slum area,inhabited predominantly by members of an ethnic or other minority group,often as a result of social or economic restrictions,pressures,or hardships.
The Ghettoes in Europe were sectioned off areas of the city thickly populated with people of the Jewish ethnic group as a result of social restrictions, pressures, and hardships, just like the definition says.
- What are the steps in the “race toward death” (10)? List all of the steps (there are more than 5!)
Jews prohibited from leaving homes for 3 days under penalty of death.Jews forbidden to own gold, jewelry, or other valuables.
All Jews have to wear a yellow star.
Jews can't go to restuarants, travel by train, attend synagogue, or be out after 6 o'clock pm.
Move to ghettoes
Liquidation of the Ghettoes
Move to smaller Ghetto
Final liquidation
Sent away on the trains
Chapters 2 and 3
Lars Response:
The two quotes I choose that impacted me are particularly meaningful to me are:
"There are eighty of you in this wagon," added the German officer. "If anyone is missing, you'll all be shot, like dogs. . . ." (24)
"Look! Look at it! Fire! A terrible fire! Mercy! Oh that fire!" (25)
I would say that this quote almost seemed a reflection of what was to come. Mrs. Schachter had already been through a horrible ordeal. She had lost most of her family and was beginning to lose her mind. She was already in a living hell, a fiery place of evil. Later in the book, when Wiesel was talking about the barracks, he stated "This is what the antechamber of hell must look like (34). Once he had begun to experience the ordeal of the camps, Wiesel was also comparing them to fiery, evil hell, albeit in a less dramatic way. Perhaps, he may eventually have been reduced to the state of Mrs. Schachter as well. Another interesting thing about this quote is that one of the first sights the prisoners see upon entering the camp is the crematorium, and many of them meet their deaths in its fiery blaze. This is an amazing example of how even a work of non-fiction can still use foreshadowing.
What has surprised me the most in chapters 1-3 is how clueless the Jews were regarding their upcoming fate. (Partner B)
What surprised me was that people behaved so differently toward each other. Some, like the Pole on pg. 41, tried to be kind and warn the prisoners about their fates. Others, like the man on pg. 30, tried to help the new prisoners survive, but also became enraged at them for their ignorance. Another man on the same page also became angry, insulting the prisoners and acting as if they should have known what was in store. Curiously, these men had probably both fallen into the same trap, so they really couldn't blame anyone. And back on the train, on pg. 26, some of the prisoners savagely beat Mrs. Schachter because she was waking them up and beginning to frighten them. However, now that I think about it, this isn't very surprising. These people probably had little in common other than their religion, and possibly their hometown. It's natural that they would quarrell. Also, some people are selfish while others care about others. If anything, a horrible situation like this would only intensify emotions and personalities, creating people that would beat up a woman just to keep her quiet, and those that would be humane and try to warn others. (Partner A)
List of things that are confusing, unfamiliar
foreign Jews (3). I was confused why some Jews in Transylvania would be considered foreign (3)
I was unfamiliar with why there would be two ghettos in one town (9).
I am unfamiliar with what a Jewish council was and why they were set up (9). http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005265
Truncheon (13). I didn't know what is was.
Where did the people go in the ghettos who were originally living there (17).
Los! (32)
Sonder-Kommando (32) http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007327 4th paragraph of the Operation Reinhard section.
"Form fives!" (37)
1. Read one other pair’s wiki response page focusing on what they say has surprised/affected/etc them the most. How does their response link to yours?
It was all different. Everyone has a different thing that surprised/affected them the most.
2. What are the Jews reactions to: Moishe the Beadle, the ghettoes, and Madame Schachter?
Originally they were all terrified. They then began to feel some sympathy for Madame Schachter, thinking she was mad. However, as she continued to utter warnings, she began to scare them again and they had her bound and gagged, and then beat her several times to make her shut up. They starting acting like she was selfish, shouting things like "She's not the only one in here."
3. Looking carefully through your answers to #2, what is similar about all of these and why is this similarity a logical way for the Jews to act?
Fear and denial. They didn't want to admit that terrible things were going to happen.
4. What do you think the title, Night, means?
Night is the end of the day and the begining of the dark and evil times. The end of the relatively good lives of the Jews as they are moving into the darkness and evil of the Nazi regime. They are now in utter darkness.
Chpt 4
"I felt no pity for him. In fact, I was pleased with what was happening to him: my gold crown was safe. It could be useful to me one day, to buy something, some bread or even time to live. At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my crust of stale bread. The bread, the soup--those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time" (52).
What he means here is that at this: so much pain and suffering has happened to him that it doesn't really matter anymore and that he feels no shame in trying to simply survive.
Near the end, Wiesel witnesses the hanging of several people, one of which was a young boy who was adored by everyone in the camp. Wiesel and the other prisoners watch as the men and the boy are brought up to the gallows and hanged. They then have to file past the corpses and witness the boys death throws as he slowly suffocates due to how light he is. Wiesel was one of the people that had to file past him while he was still alive. As he wtinessed this, he lost his faith in God, believing that the Nazis had even destroyed him. I found this to be horrifying and ended up imagining myself in the boy's place and thinking what a terrible way it was to die. (Partner A)
What is so horrifying about this scene is that it is here that Elie Wiesel loses all of this faith in God, and really humanity. He made a point of talking about his religion and faith in God in the beginning of Night and how much his religion and faith defined him. But it is at this stage, when he sees the horrible pain of this boy, who still represented a human being in the camps, he feels that he has not only lost his faith in God, he has lost his faith in himself.
Chapter 5
The passage that describes Akiba Drumer's eyes is: "His eyes would suddenly go blank, leaving two gaping wounds, two wells of terror" (76).
Drumer's soul has become blank as he has lost the will to live. He lost his will when he lost his faith and the will to fight. He no longer believed God was there for him, and he no longer believed the horror would end. He saw no reason to continue living in this state, and his resolve crumbled. Elie Wiesel also lost his faith, and he did begin to lose the will to live. He felt he was in a living hell, abandoned by God, from which he would never escape. However, he had another factor that determined his fate. He would not be separated from his father. This superceded any choice over whether to live or die. He would live if his father was living, and he would follow him to death if it happened. This was shown at the beginning, on pg. 32, when they were facing the selection at the entrance to the camps. "I first wanted to see where they would send my father. Were he to have gone to the right, I would have run after him." He chose to follow his father into either life or death.
My quote that I find powerful: "What are You, my God? I thought angrily. How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does Your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe, in the face of all this cowardice, this decay and this misery?" (66)
Chapters 6/7
My father had huddled near me, draped in his blanket, shoulders laden with snow. And what if he were dead, as well? I called out to him. No response. I would have screamed if I could have. He was not moving. Suddenly, the evidence overswhelmed me: there was no longer any reason to live, any reason to fight" (98-99).
His father is the only thing that kept him alive at this point. He didnt want his father to live through seeing his own son perish so he fought very hard to survive. If his father had not been with him, he would be dead right now.
"He had lost his son in the commotion. He had searched for him among the dying, to no avail. Then he had dug through the snow to find his body. In vain. For three years, they had stayed close to one another. Side by side, they had endured the suffering, the blows; they had waited for their ration of bread and they had prayed. Three years, from camp to camp, from selection to selection. And now--when the end seemed near--fate had separated them. When he came near me, Rabbi Eliahu whispered, 'It happened on the road. We lost sight of one another during the journey. I fell behind a little, at the rear of the column. I didn't have the strength to run anymore. And my son didn't notice. That's all I know. Where has he disappeared? Where can I find him? Perhaps you've seen him somewhere?' 'No, Rabbi Eliahu, I haven't seen him.' And so he left, as he had come: a shadow swept away by the wind. He had already gone through the door when I remembered that I had noticed his son running beside me. I had forgotten and so had not mentioned it to Rabbi Eliahu! But then I remembered something else: his son had seen him losing ground, sliding back to the rear of the column. He had seen him. And he had continued to run in front, letting the distance between them become greater" (90-91).
What had happened here is that the rabbi had lost his son and was looking for him, Elie had seen the son run ahead so he could die and not have his father seem him die. However, Elie did not remember what had happened until after the rabbi left, so he did not get to tell him about the rabbi son's fate. Perhaps it was for the best.
Chapters 8 and 9
The quote from the book that affected me most was, "we received no food. We lived on snow; it took the place of our bread. The days resembles the nights, and the nights left in our souls the dregs of their darkness. The train rolled slowly, often halted for a few hours and continued. It never stopped snowing. We remained lying on the floor for days and nights, on on top of the other, never uttering a word. We were nothing but frozen bodies. Our eyes closed, we merely waited for the next stop, to unload our dead."
This quote affects me so much because I like how he says the days resembled the nights, meaning it didn't matter what time of day it was, he felt as if he was dead. In other words, his soul had been taken by the experience and he felt nothing.
I was actually sadder during the middle of the book because he was able to express his feeling and story more, because his father was still alive, and that meant that he had something to live for. By the end of the book, his father is dead and his book becomes almost rushed, as if he did not want to complete it because his father was dead. I felt by the end, he really had given up, not only with life, but with telling his story.
The quote that affected me the most was "My father was pleading. 'My son, water...I'm burning up...My insides...' 'Silence over there!' barked the officer. 'Eliezer,' continued my father, 'water...' The officer came closer and shouted at him to be silent. But my father did not here. He continued to call me. The officer wielded his club and dealt him a violent blow to the head. I didn't move. I was afraid, my body was afraid of another blow, this time to my head. My father groaned once more, I heard: 'Eliezer...' I could see that he was still breathing--in gasps. I didn't move." This affected me because it is such a horrible scene. A grown man, reduced to an torturous, uncomprehending, child-like state, being beaten by an officer despite the fact he only has hours to live while his son doesn't lift a finger. The officer was displaying how cruel man can be, Elie Wiesel was displaying how defeated, scared, and indifferent man can become, and Wiesel's father was displaying what man can be reduced to.
At the end of the book, I felt horrified by the atrocities of the Nazis. In one year, they had turned a caring, devoted, child into a souless, hunger-driven corpse. And he was one of the lucky ones! Others suffered far worse fates. It was an indescribable tragedy.
All the terrible stuff that happened was because of indifference. The Nazis destroyed you by destroying your soul. Making you INDIFFERENT to your fate. The Nazis hated the Jews as a whole, and this made them completely indifferent to the sufferings of each individual Jews. He started to become indifferent to what happened to his father. He didn't hate him, but he didn't really love him. He also lost all faith. He was indifferent to God. He was indifferent to the possibilty of survival. He no longer cared.